Free Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart Page A

down on a coffee table at a TriBeCa loft party. Ah, how thoroughly, consistently, delightfully wrong Mother was about everything, about the whole country, about the happy possibilities for young immigrant V. Girshkin. Wrong! wrong! wrong! Vladimir thought as he ran across the Sheep Meadow dotted with unemployed sunbathers on a lazy Monday afternoon, the midtown skyscrapers looking down on them with corporate indifference. Mother, in fact, was serving time in one of those smoked-glass monstrosities built before the last recession: a corner office draped with American flags and a framed photo of the Girshkin Tudor, minus its three inhabitants.
    And what a day for a run, too. Cool as early spring, gray and drizzly—the kind of day that felt like playing hooky from school, or, in Vladimir’s case, from work. And the kind of day that reminded him of her —Francesca—the grayness, the ambivalence, the supposed intelligence that abounded in wet English days; plus the weight of the surrounding dampness brought to mind the way he had been cradled in her neck in the taxi. Yes, here again was a kind person, and, so far, Vladimir had only been involved with kind women. Perhaps to love Vladimir required a certain kindness. In that case, what good luck!
    The run, however, ended after one muddy slope as Vladimir’s lungs—genuine handiwork of Leningrad—let themselves be known, and the sprinter was forced to seek a rain-soaked bench.
    HE MADE IT to work around two. It was Chinese Week at the Emma Lazarus Society and the Chinese lined up behind the China Desk, spilling over into the waiting room where there was tea and a stuffed panda. The few Russians that came out of the wet afternoon giggled at the stream of Asians and tried to emulate the quiet buzz of their conversations with a barrage of “Ching Chang Chong Chung.” Fights almost broke out.
    Although Vladimir was taught to foster multiculturalism, he looked blankly into the sneering faces of his countrymen, stamping his way through their mountains of documents. Who could think of immigrants on a day like this?
    “Baobab, I just met someone. A woman.”
    There was confusion on the other end of the line. “Sex? What?”
    “No sex. But we were in the same bed, I think.”
    “You’re a slave to prophylaxis, Girshkin,” Baobab tittered. “All right, tell us everything. What’s she like? Thin? Rubenesque?”
    “She’s worldly.”
    “And Challah’s reaction when she found out?”
    Vladimir considered this unhappy scenario. Little Challah Bread. Little Bondage Bear. Ditched once again. Uh-hum. “So how did it go with Laszlo?” Vladimir ventured. “Did you give him the worker’s fist?”
    “No worker’s fist. Actually, I’m enrolled in his new seminar: ‘Stanislavsky and You.’ ”
    “Oh, Baobab.”
    “This way I can keep tabs on Roberta. And meet other actresses.And Laszlo says he might get us into this new production of Waiting for Godot in Prava next spring.”
    “Prava?” The edges of a strange dream skirted Vladimir’s memory; in kaleidoscopic succession he saw Mother, the Fan Man, an empty parachute falling out of the sky. “What nonsense,” muttered Vladimir. “I must stop thinking of this Rybakov and think only of my Francesca!” And to Baobab he said, “You mean the Paris of the 90s?”
    “The SoHo of Eastern Europe. Exactly. Say, when are you going to introduce me to your new friend?”
    “There’s a party tonight in TriBeCa. It starts at . . . Hey! What? You, sir. You in the kaftan . . . Put that chair down! ” A small but lively race riot was underway by the fax machine. Vladimir’s Haitian colleague was already there, deploying security personnel with gusto, as if she were back on her deposed father’s estate in Port-au-Prince. Vladimir was summoned to fetch the agency bullhorn.
    “ I ’ M FROM LENINGRAD ,” he said, bowing his head in gratitude as Francesca’s father, Joseph, squeezed a glass of Armagnac into his